These are illusions of popular history which successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumpths; a good deed is its own rewar...
When I love, I love with everything within me.” Seeing him with his child, this was obvious. Did he mean…yes, he meant exactly what he said, and it was like he wanted her to know it went much deeper than only with his child. That whatever he love...
Food and eating often mask our pain, our inner longing for God, for acceptance. It is key to know our motivation for eating as well as for other actions. Why do I eat? Am I tired, am I bored, am I stressed and tired? A good practice is to live in the...
When you grow up as a girl, it is like there are faint chalk lines traced approximately three inches around your entire body at all times, drawn by society and often religion and family and particularly other women, who somehow feel invested in how y...
The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, ...
Will we ever see his like again? It is doubtful. But at least for a brief moment in time we were lucky to have him as one of our own: an English lionheart who was the terror of the continent, who earned the love and respect of everyone who had the pr...
Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious powers behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat’s back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read the ritual, including the ...
This is the sixty-nine," I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers -- two of them -- on the action, so that he would not overlook it. "Why is it dubbed sixty-nine?" he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosi...
It takes two to tango” isn’t even true on the dance floor. One person can do a lot of evil all on his or her own. But the Theory of Mutual Blame arose sometime before Doc was even born. Perhaps it was a takeoff on Freud’s seduction theory or th...
Just as God's love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in an infinite variety of concrete worldly action,...
For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men's opinions? The necessity of believing without kno...
We can act only in our time, among the people who surround us. We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. Since all contemporary action leads to murder, direct or...
I felt the full breadth and depth of the ocean around the sphere of the Earth, back billions of years to the beginning of life, across all the passing lives and deaths, the endless waves of swimming joy and quiet losses of exquisite creatures with fi...
PDR: Persons of Dubious Reality; refugees from the collective consciousness. Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real, from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence a...
[T]he scripture worshippers put the writings ahead of God. Instead of interpreting God's actions in nature, for example, they interpret nature in the light of the Scripture. Nature says the rock is billions of years old, but the book says different, ...
There's a gentle sigh which descends like billowing silk upon the soul that accepts its coming death. It's a gentle pocket of air in the turbulence of everyday life... the silk settles around you as if it has been drifting towards the earth forever a...
In the interview I was told that I’d be replacing Robert, who was a robot. The company thought they could save some money and automate the front desk position, because they didn’t have to pay Robert, there was no fear of legal action being brough...
There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people. People are unique in the inner life of the mind -- what they are in their thought-world determines how they act. This is true of their value...
Gardening and making your own soap and home-birthing your babies are fine, but these are inherently limited actions. If we want to see genuine food safety, if we want to see sustainable products, if we want to see a better women's health system, and ...
Dancing. I couldn't understand the fascination my brother had for it, but I could respect what it meant to him. How could one imagine and wonder about something so simple? An action most take for granted, yet to those with limited abilities, it's as ...
Today we know more about Jupiter than the guy who lives next door to us. We can predict where an election will go, we can turn a gene on or off, and we can even send a robot to Mars, but we are lost if asked to explain or predict the phenomena we mig...
